Rudolf Steiner Archive & e.Lib Document

The Experiences of Sleep and their Spiritual Background

The Experiences of Sleep and their Spiritual Background

The Experiences of Sleep and their Spiritual Background

Rudolf Steiner Archive Document

Lectures Section

This is the 1st of 16 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Stuttgart,
and dates from the Fall and Winter of 1922. The title of this
series of lectures is:
Spiritual Relationships in the Human Organism.
They were published in German as:
Geistiger Zusammenhaenge in der Gestaltung des Menschlichen Organismus.
This lecture was translated from a shorthand report, unrevised by
the lecturer, by an unknown translator.
From Bn/GA 218.

A Lecture given
by Rudolf Steiner
Stuttgart, October 9th, 1922
Bn/GA 218

This is the 1st of 16 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Stuttgart,
and dates from the Fall and Winter of 1922. The title of this
series of lectures is:
Spiritual Relationships in the Human Organism.
They were published in German as:
Geistiger Zusammenhaenge in der Gestaltung des
Menschlichen Organismus.
This lecture was translated from a shorthand report, unrevised by
the lecturer, by an unknown translator.
It is presented here with the kind permission of the Rudolf
Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.
From GA# 218.

Donated by an anonymous donor, this lecture has been made available to everyone.

The Experiencesof Sleepand theirSpiritualBackground

RUDOLF STEINER

Lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Stuttgart 9 October, 1922.
Translation published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner
Nachlassverwaltung. This lecture is the first of fourteen given
between October and December 1922, eventually to be collected and
published in one volume of the Complete Centenary Edition of Rudolf
Steiner's works in the original German. (Vol. 218 in the Bibliographical
Survey, 1961.)

In speaking of the life of the soul, a certain expression in common use
today is made to cover a great deal. I refer to the expression: the
‘unconscious.’ On the one hand it admits that in respect
of the soul we are obliged to speak of forces or the like which do not
play into the ordinary consciousness; but on the other hand, by the very
word itself we confess our inability to say anything about these forces.
We merely label them the ‘unconscious.’

In
setting out to describe what is the essential nature of human knowledge,
we have to say that man's search for knowledge has to be pursued in the
external world by means of observation and experiment, aided by the
understanding with its power of combination. But then we can go on to
show that when we investigate our consciousness, we find in it all
manner of manifestations — thoughts, feelings, impulses of will,
etc. — of which we are aware that they cannot be fathomed in their
true nature by following the method of external scientific investigation
and working with experiment, observation and the combining power of
thought. Neither does such vision as we can gain by practising
self-observation enable us to penetrate to the nature and being of what
thus reveals itself in the life of the soul, so long as our
self-observation is carried out purely with the ordinary forces of
consciousness. We speak accordingly of the ‘unconscious,’
but while we do so, at the same time we renounce all claim to be able to
penetrate into its world. This renunciation is entirely justified if we
want to restrict ourselves to those means of attaining knowledge which
are in common acceptance today. For as a matter of fact, no one who
relies on these methods alone can ever carry his observation of the life
of the soul any further than that during waking life, ideas, feelings,
impulses of will-expressions, that is, of the inner nature and being of
man — surge up from the depths; they are obviously closely bound
up with the external bodily nature, and it is quite impossible to
demonstrate conclusively that what shows itself to begin with in such
close dependence on bodily conditions can have any existence of its own
beyond these bodily conditions.

Now as
you know very well, in Anthroposophy we take this as our starting-point.
We fully accept the fact that with such means of acquiring knowledge as
are recognised today, the depths of man's soul-nature can never be
fathomed. We fully accept the fact that as far as these means go we can
do no other than refer simply to an ‘unconscious.’ We do not
even need to consider birth and death — the two boundaries of
physical life on earth; we need look only at the condition of ordinary
sleep as it occurs every day of a man's life, and we shall be obliged to
admit that, taking what can be learned about the experiences of the soul
with the ordinary means of attaining knowledge, it is impossible to
raise any objection when a conclusion such as the following is reached.
It is asserted, for example, from the point of view of ordinary
knowledge, that all thinking, feeling and willing, as they are present
in consciousness in ordinary day-to-day life, show so great a dependence
upon bodily conditions that it may well be inferred that experiences of
soul emerge out of the bodily conditions as out of a subconscious
region, and that what happens during sleep is simply that the purely
organic life predominates as such and during such time allows no ideas
or feelings or acts of will to flow forth from it. When such a statement
is made there is nothing to be said. At the most we can point to the
dream and suggest how dreams appear to come out of the life of sleep and
to be simply remembered in the waking life. From the way the dream plays
through the life of sleep the conclusion might be drawn that the
soul-nature does in some way or other persist during sleep. Here,
however, we are on uncertain ground; and the fact is, no serious and
open-minded person can, with no more than the ordinary means of
knowledge at his disposal, be expected to speak in any other way about
the soul than to say it exhibits phenomena which are to all appearances
absolutely dependent on bodily conditions.

Anthroposophical knowledge, however, just because it accepts in all
seriousness this capacity — or rather incapacity — of the
ordinary means of knowledge, must, on the other hand, endeavour to find
other means of knowing the world. And, as you are aware, such have been
attained; they have often been explained and described here Imaginative,
Inspired, Intuitive Knowledge. By means of these special ways of knowing
— ways of knowing that by dint of strenuous effort have to be
developed as new faculties from out of the ordinary life of the soul we
are then in a position to bring clarity into a realm where with the
ordinary means of knowledge clarity can never be attained.

And
now, on the basis of these three stages of higher knowledge, I should
like to give you a picture of a very important region of the
subconscious or unconscious in man, namely the region of soul-life
between going to sleep and waking. I have already described this region
to you many times from various standpoints. Today I will do so again
from one particular aspect.

Let me
begin by picturing to you quite simply the condition of sleep as seen by
Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive Knowledge. For ordinary
consciousness all that we can say is that whereas from waking to going
to sleep consciousness is filled with a content, on going to sleep this
content first of all grows dim, is then gradually extinguished and a
condition of unconsciousness ensues. During the consciousness of daytime
man cannot, with ordinary means of knowledge, tell what his soul does
during the time between going to sleep and waking. If the soul has any
experience of this condition, the experience does not enter into
ordinary consciousness. For ordinary consciousness darkness spreads over
all that the soul undergoes — assuming, that is, that it undergoes
any experience at all in sleep. But now, with the advent of Imaginative
Knowledge, the condition of sleep begins to be lit up, the darkness
begins to change into light, and it is possible to judge clearly of what
is experienced by the soul during, at any rate, the early stages of
sleep. And in Inspired and Intuitive Knowledge one can penetrate still
farther into these experiences. Do not suppose that we can by this means
look into sleep somewhat in the way we look into a peepshow; but through
Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive Knowledge we can experience
conditions of soul that resemble sleep inasmuch as our relation to our
body at such times is similar to the relation during sleep; only it is
experienced, not unconsciously, but in full consciousness. And through
being able thus consciously during waking life to experience in a
similar manner to the way one experiences in sleep, the possibility is
opened for us to behold what the soul of man undergoes during sleep, and
to describe it.

When a
man goes to sleep, you know how in the moment of doing so the
consciousness, already growing vague and indistinct, is often confused
by dreams. This dream-world can, to begin with, help us very little
indeed towards a knowledge of the life of the soul. For all we can know
about dreams in daytime consciousness with the ordinary means of
knowledge remains something that is quite external. Dreams are obviously
not things upon which we can build in a sure and well-defined way, until
we have a knowledge about sleep itself by some other means. He who truly
acquires a knowledge of the condition of sleep knows very well that
dreams are in reality misleading rather than enlightening. What the soul
experiences in sleep it experiences unconsciously. But now, since I am
going to place a picture of it before you arising from Imaginative,
Inspired and Intuitive Knowledge, I must portray it as if it were
experienced consciously. I shall have to describe to you the experiences
of the soul from going to sleep to waking as if they were experienced in
consciousness. They are not; nevertheless, what I describe is truly
experienced by the soul, although without knowing anything of it. It is
present as an actual fact, and the effect of the experience is not
limited to the time between going to sleep and waking. For it works into
the physical organism of the human being, and it does so most of all
during waking life. We carry within us during the day, from waking until
going to sleep, the after-effects of the experiences of the night; and
if it is true that for the civilization in which we live what we do with
the instrumentality of consciousness is of great significance, it is no
less true that all that goes on with our own selves depends very little
indeed upon our consciousness, and very much upon what we experience
unconsciously between going to sleep and waking.

When we
have gone to sleep, and the sense-perceptions have been gradually
paralysed and the will-impulses have ceased to work, we experience in
the first place an undifferentiated condition of soul. In this undefined
experience a strong sense of time is present, but all feeling of space
is almost completely wiped out. It is an experience that is comparable
with swimming; we are, so to speak, moving about in a general,
indefinite world-substance. One has really to coin words to express what
the soul goes through at this stage. One might say, the soul feels as if
it were like a wave in a great sea, a wave that is organised within
itself and yet feels itself surrounded on every hand by the sea and
affected by the influences of the sea much as during the life of day the
soul is affected by impressions of colour, tone or warmth, perceiving
them in a quite definite and differentiated manner. In the life of day
you feel yourself as a human being enclosed within your skin, and having
a definite position in space. in the moment that follows the going to
sleep, you feel — I say you ‘feel,’ I describe it all
as if it were consciousness; the fact is there, it is only the
consciousness of the fact that is lacking — you feel like a wave
in a universal sea; you feel yourself now here, now there; as I said,
the definite sense of space ceases. A general sense of time, however,
persists.

But now
this experience is united with another, namely, an experience of being
forsaken and alone. It is like sinking into an abyss. If a man were to
experience consciously this first stage of sleep without right
preparation, he would in truth be exposed to great risk, for he would
find it quite unbearable to lose in this way almost all sense of space
and live merely in a general, universal feeling of time, to feel himself
in this vague way merely a part of a universal sea of substance, where
scarcely anything is distinguishable — where indeed the only thing
one can distinguish is that one is a self within a universal
world-existence. If consciousness were present, one would actually have
the sensation of hovering over an abyss.

And now
a still further experience is united with this one. A tremendous need
for the support of the spiritual makes itself felt in the soul, a great
need and longing to be united with the spiritual. In the universal sea
in which one is swimming, one has, as it were, lost that feeling of
security which comes from being in contact with the material things of
the world of our waking hours. Hence one feels — one would
feel, that is, if the condition were conscious — a deep yearning
to be united with the divine and spiritual. And one may say too that
this experience of movement in an undifferentiated world-substance
carries with it the sense of being concealed and protected within
divine-spiritual reality. Please observe the way I am describing all
this. To repeat once more, I am describing it to you as if the soul
experienced it consciously. It does not do so; but let me remind you
that when you experience something consciously in waking life, a great
deal is going on at the same time unconsciously in your organism. This
is a simple fact. Let us say, for example, you feel joy. When you feel
joy, your blood beats differently from the way it beats when you are
sad. You experience the joy or sorrow in your consciousness, but not the
difference in the pulsation of the blood. The pulsation of the blood is,
notwithstanding, a fact. And it is the same here too. What I describe as
swimming in an undifferentiated world-substance, and again what I
describe as a need of God — there is a reality in the life of soul
answering to each one of these descriptions. And Imaginative Knowledge
does nothing else than lift this reality into consciousness, just as
ordinary waking consciousness can lift into consciousness the pulsation
of the blood which lies behind joy or sorrow. The facts are there, and
they work on into our life of day; so that when we wake in the morning
our whole organism is refreshed. The refreshment is due to the
experience we have undergone during the night in our life of soul. What
takes place in the soul when it is separated from the body during the
time between going to sleep and waking is of great significance in its
after-effects during waking life on the following day. We should not be
able rightly to make use of our body on the following day if we had not
raised ourselves up out of our connection with the external world of the
physical senses and been immersed in this undefined experience which I
have described. Nor would there rise up from the depths of our will
during waking life something like a need and longing to relate all the
differentiated world around us to a universal existence. The fact that
we feel a need to relate the world of the senses to a divine existence
is a direct result of this first stage of sleep.

The
question may well be asked: Why is man not content merely to place the
several objects of the world side by side? Why is he not content to go
through the world accepting the existence of plants, animals, etc.,
without question? Why does he want to try to philosophize about it all?
For the very simplest people do so; and incidentally, I may say they do
it with far more understanding than the philosophers themselves! Why
does man want to build up a philosophy of how the things hang together?
Why does he relate the single example that meets his eye to a universal
whole, and ask how the individual is rooted and grounded in the cosmos?
He would not do so, if it were not that during sleep he enters in an
intensely real and living way into the undefined existence I have
described; nor would he ever in the waking state come to a feeling of
God, were it not that he has experienced the corresponding fact in the
first stage of sleep. We owe to sleep something that has untold
significance for our deep inner nature as human beings.

As man
continues asleep, he comes into other stages which are not accessible to
Imaginative Knowledge, but require Inspired Knowledge for their
perception. Something else now shows itself as a fact of the life of
soul and is reflected for Inspired Knowledge in the way that the
pulsation of the blood is reflected in joy and sorrow. To begin with, we
find a disintegration of the soul into the greatest possible number of
individual entities. The soul literally splits up its life into many
parts, and this process is united with an experience which, when it
lights up into consciousness, is felt as an experience of anxiety and
fear. After the soul has passed through what we have described as a
hovering over the abyss or as a swimming in a universal world-substance,
and has experienced at the same time a longing for the divine-spiritual,
it comes into this condition of anxiety — that is to say, into a
condition that would be anxiety, if it were consciously experienced. The
experience is due to the fact that the soul is no longer merely swimming
in a general world-substance, but has, as it were, immersed itself in
individual beings of soul-and-spirit. The soul comes into a certain
relationship with these beings, and doing so severally, is now itself
not one but manifold.

The
anxiety of this stage of sleep has to be somehow met and overcome. In
the time of the Earth's evolution that preceded the Mystery of Golgotha,
teachings were given in the places of the Mysteries and found their way
to the individual human beings; these teachings enabled the soul to
experience other feelings in addition to those aroused by contact with
the outer world of the senses. Such teachings were given in connection
with the most varied religious practices, but they all awakened these
feelings in the souls of men by giving them ideas and conceptions of God
in such a way as was right for those ancient times. Men were then so
constituted that even during waking life the spiritual world still shone
into their consciousness. The farther we go back in the evolution of
mankind on Earth, the more evident does it become that man had a kind of
clairvoyance in very ancient times, traces of which remained on into
later epochs; through this clairvoyance he perceived inwardly how he
himself, before he began his life on Earth, had lived in pre-earthly
existence as a being of soul-and-spirit. It was not something that he
merely believed; it was for him a certainty; he experienced within
himself something left over from a pre-earthly existence.

If I
may be allowed to use a trivial comparison, I would remind you of how
when someone has inherited a certain faculty from his parents, he is
aware that this faculty has inserted itself into the course of his life
through its own immediate existence; he has not acquired it, it has come
over to him from his ancestors. In a similar way the men of an older
time knew that certain experiences they had in their soul did not come
to them from what they had seen with their eyes, but were an inheritance
from a pre-earthly existence. They knew it from the experiences
themselves. We have again and again to call attention to the fact that
in the course of evolution man has grown free from such experiences, and
that we live in an age when the ordinary consciousness has no
experiences that are explicable as an inheritance from a pre-earthly
existence. It was accordingly easier for the men of olden times to be
taught by their spiritual leaders in the Mystery-centres how they should
relate themselves in their feelings to what they already had in their
soul as spiritual experience. Power came to them with the impulses they
received from the Mystery-centres, and they were able to carry out of
ordinary day life into the life of night, into the life of sleep, the
strength to hold their own against the anxiety described above. The
anxiety rose up out of the depths of the life of sleep. If a man was to
have power to bring away with him out of this anxiety not general
fatigue or exhaustion or the like, but instead a freshness of his whole
organism, then he had to acquire that power on the previous day during
the waking life.

Such is
the connection between day and night. Night brings, at a certain stage
of sleep, anxiety. Into this anxiety must flow power man has gained from
religious or similar experience on the day before; and when these two
things come together and unite — the power remaining over from the
day before and the new and original experience of the night — then
a reviving and refreshing force streams into the organism for the new
day that follows.

A true
spiritual science is not concerned to speak in general, abstract phrases
and affirm the presence of a universal divine ordering in the world. It
is not satisfied to describe the single objects of the world in their
sense-aspect and then add: And now within this sense-appearance a
general world-ordering holds sway. Spiritual science has to show in
concrete detail how this divine ordering of the world works. If we would
be adequate to the tasks of human evolution in the future, we cannot be
content merely to say: I feel refreshed after a sound and healthy sleep;
God has granted me refreshment. We should have to despair of science if
we must insist upon a strict science for the world of the senses, and
could not at the same time extend this strictness to what relates to the
super-sensible, but there had to remain content with phrases, such as the
general statement that a divine ordering lies at the foundation of the
world. No, on the contrary, we learn to be more and more definite; and
we can show how the anxiety which occurs in the second stage of sleep,
is as it were blended and intermingled with the power drawn from the
religious experience of the previous day that works on into the night,
and how these then give rise in their union to the power with which the
physical organism is refreshed for the next day.

In this
way we come to see more and more clearly how the spiritual lives in the
physical. The means of knowledge that hold good today admit only a
physical content of the world, supplemented by a way of speaking in
general terms of how in, or above, this physical content lives something
spiritual. Humanity will, however, sink lower and lower in civilization
and culture if men will not learn to extend to the spiritual world the
strict exactitude practised in the study of the external world.

When,
with Inspired Consciousness, we follow up further the stages of sleep
and pass from the first to the second stage, the inner experience of the
soul becomes altogether different from what it is in the life of
day.

Now it
is quite possible to recognise by means of ordinary natural science
— if we will only follow it out to the consequences — that
our life of soul is intimately attached to the processes of breathing
and of blood-circulation, and to the process of nutrition that permeates
the circulation; we can feel that something is taking place when, for
example, we exert ourselves strongly in movement. We feel how the
soul-and-spirit within us is united with the activities of our body, and
when we try to form a picture of the breathing process or of the
circulatory process, we know that we are picturing something in which,
during waking life, dwells the experience of the soul, in which it is,
as it were, embedded. The experience of the soul during sleep is not
attached in any way to the senses, nevertheless it too is a well-defined
inner life that can also be referred to something, in the same way that
the inner life of day can be referred to the life of breathing and the
life of circulation. Inspired Knowledge leads us to see how this inner
life of night-time is connected with an unfolding of inner forces,
comparable with the unfolding of the forces of breathing and of
circulation, and is in fact a copy of the planetary movements of our
system. Note well, I do not say that every night from going to sleep
until waking we are ourselves within, or united with, the movements of
the planets, but that we are inserted into something which is a copy, so
to speak in miniature, of our planetary cosmos or rather of its
movements. As our life of soul by day has its dwelling-place in the
circulation of the blood, so our life of soul by night is inserted into
something which is a copy of the planetary movements of our solar
system. If we must say for the day-time: the white corpuscles, the red
corpuscles circulate in us, the breathing power revolves in us, enabling
us to breathe in and breathe out — then we must say for the
night-time: there revolves in us a copy of the movement of Mercury, of
the movement of Venus, of the movement of Jupiter. Our life of soul from
going to sleep to waking is, so to say, in a little planetary cosmos.
From being personal and human our life becomes cosmic during sleep. And
Inspired Knowledge can then discover how when we are tired in the
evening, the forces which have held our blood in pulsation during the
day are able to keep vitality going during the night through their own
faculty of persistence, but that in order to be turned again into the
day life of soul, these forces require the fresh impulse that comes from
the experience of a copy of the planetary cosmos during the night. In
the moment of waking the after-effects are implanted into us of the
experience we have received from the copies of the planetary
movements.

This it
is which unites the cosmos with our individual life. When we wake in the
morning, the forces we need would not be able to stream into us in the
right way so that consciousness is properly present, if we had not this
after-working of the experiences of the night.

You
will be able to see from this how little justification there often is
when people complain bitterly of sleeplessness. As a general rule, they
are deeply self-deceived. I will not, however, enter into this subject
now. Naturally, those who labour under the delusion have themselves no
idea of it. They think they are not asleep, whereas in reality they are
in an abnormal sleep. They think that their soul is not outside the body
and cannot experience this planetary existence. The fact is, they are in
a condition which is certainly dull, but which yet admits of their
experiencing the very same that another human being experiences when he
is in a healthy sleep. But as I have said, I will not at the present
moment enter further into these exceptional cases.

Speaking generally, the description I am now giving is true for man,
namely that in the second stage of sleep he lives a cosmic life. I have
indicated to you how in olden times before the Mystery of Golgotha,
impulses went forth from the places of the Mysteries which gave man the
power to come out of this anxiety, the power to withstand the tendency
to dispersion and pass through in a sound and healthy way what he had to
pass through at this time. That is to say, he was imbued with a power
that enabled him to enter into the experience of the planets and not
stop short at the experience of being dismembered and scattered. The
anxiety was due to this latter experience, while the experience of being
in the planets came as a result of taking with one out of the experience
of the previous day the power I have described. Since the time of the
Mystery of Golgotha it has been possible for men to possess themselves
of the same power that was formerly given from the Mysteries, by
directing their souls to the events of the Mystery of Golgotha. Whoever
enters in a right and living way into an experience of the Mystery of
Golgotha will have Christ for his strong guide in the moment when his
soul comes into the realm of anxiety during the time between going to
sleep and waking. Thus the humanity of modern times has through the
Christ-experience what an older humanity had from the Mysteries.

Passing
onward from the stage of sleep just described, man enters upon a stage
which I may be permitted to name in plain terms; for after I have taken
time to explain more fully the planetary experience, you will not take
offence when I say at once that following on the planetary experience
man has an experience of the fixed stars. Having lived during the second
stage of sleep in the copy of the planetary movements, he now lives in
the constellations, or rather in copies of the constellations, of the
fixed stars of the zodiac. This experience is a very real fact during
the third stage of the life of man by night. He begins then also to
experience the difference between the Sun as a planet and as a fixed
star. It is not at all clear to a man of the present day why in ancient
astronomies the Sun counted at the same time as a planet and also in a
sense as a fixed star. During the second stage of sleep the Sun has
actually, in this experience, planetary qualities; we learn to know the
conspicuous and distinct relation in which it stands to the whole life
of man on Earth. In the third stage we learn to know the Sun in its
constellation in relation to the other constellations of the stars, for
example, of the zodiac.

In
short, we live our way into the cosmos with far greater intensity than
was the case in the previous stage of sleep. We have this experience of
the fixed stars, and we retain from it deeper and still more important
impulses for the life of the following day than we should be able to
have from the planetary experiences alone. We owe it to the experience
of the planets that our breathing process and circulatory process are,
if I may so express it, ‘enfired;’ but in order for these
processes to be permeated, as they need to be, with substance, in order
that they may be continually carrying the means of nourishment to the
whole of the organism, they require the stimulation that is given by the
experience of the fixed stars. The activity that results is apparently a
most material one; nevertheless it owes its origin to the working of
higher forces than the mere movement of the blood in circulation. As
physical human beings we are dependent in our soul-and-spirit on the way
in which this or that substance circulates in us, and this dependence is
connected, if I may so express it, with the highest heavens; it is
connected with the fact that we, as beings of soul-and-spirit, feel
within us during the third stage of sleep pictures of the constellations
of the fixed stars, just as by day when we are awake we feel within us
our stomach or our lung. We have already heard that, as by day our body
is in movement inwardly, is filled with the movements of breathing and
circulation, so by night our soul, the substance of our soul, is
something that has within it copies of the planetary movements. And now
we learn that as by day we have in us stomach and lung and heart, so by
night we have in us the constellations of the fixed stars. They
constitute our inner being. Thus during sleep man becomes in very truth
a cosmic being. This third stage of sleep is the deepest of all. Out of
it man emerges to return little by little to the waking life of day. Why
does he return? He would not return into waking life, did not forces
take hold in his soul which lead him again into his physical
organism.

We have
already approached these forces from many and varying points of view and
described how they may be named. Today I want to describe them to you
from their cosmic aspect. When through intuition we attain to a
knowledge of the experience of the fixed stars, then we learn at the
same time that the forces which lead man back again into the physical
organism are Moon forces; that is to say, they are what corresponds in
the realm of spirit to what appears in a physical picture as the Moon.
The action of the forces does not, of course, depend on whether it is
full Moon at the time or some other phase, for the Moon can shine
through the Earth in a spiritual sense. The metamorphoses which come to
expression in the visibility of the Moon do, it is true, enter into the
working, but to explain how they enter in would take us to the
consideration of much finer and subtler distinctions than we want to
describe today. It is in general the forces of the Moon that lead man
back.

We may
express it in this way. Just as the soul of man is permeated from going
to sleep to waking by the planetary forces and by the forces that reveal
themselves in the constellations of the fixed stars, just as these
forces permeate him through and through and remain with him — for
the effects work on in the waking life of day- so is man permeated
unceasingly with those spiritual forces which correspond in the cosmos
to the physical Moon. It is in reality a marvellously complicated
process, but if we want to find some way of expressing it, we might say
it is like stretching out a piece of elastic. You know how if you
stretch a piece of elastic, it goes a certain distance and then springs
back. In a somewhat similar way we, as it were, stretch the Moon forces
to a certain point and then are obliged to return. The point is reached
in the third stage of sleep, and we are then led back stage by stage by
the Moon forces, which are always intimately connected with the bringing
into the physical world of soul-and-spirit. From the third, through the
second and the first stage we are gradually led back.

It is a
fact that the initiative man is able to carry in his powers of ideation
and of feeling and thought during day-waking life, is an after-effect of
the experience of the fixed stars during the night, whilst the powers of
combination he is able to carry in them, the powers of wisdom and
cleverness, are an after-effect of the planetary experience. That which
rays into the life of day from the cosmos, coming from the experience of
the night, is obliged however to enter by way of the body. The
experience of the fixed stars shoots into our life of day by way of the
metabolism of food. Our food would not enter our head in such a way as
to enable us to unfold powers of initiative, were it not that the whole
process of metabolism is fired by what we experience at night in
connection with the stars. Nor would we be able to think intelligently
unless we received into our breathing and blood-circulation during the
day the after-effects of the planetary experience of the night.

Things
like this are always correct only in a broad and general way; and when
the facts appear to be contradictory, as in the case of people who
suffer from sleeplessness, then it rests with us to explain the
corresponding abnormalities. If such cases are looked into with real
thoroughness, they will not be found to tell against these truths. On
the contrary, these truths, which are correct in the main, open up for
the first time the possibility of explaining the single instance in its
real and essential nature.

A true
understanding of the human being is alone possible when we become
conscious in the widest sense of the fact that man lives not only in his
physical body within his skin, but in the whole world. This life in the
whole world is concealed from ordinary consciousness only because it is
very much dulled and dimmed for the waking life of day. At most we can
say that in the general sensation and experience of light we have
something of an after-working of our share in the being of a universal
cosmos. And there are perhaps other feelings, very dull and dim, wherein
man has something left between waking and going to sleep of that sense
of being within the cosmos. All such feelings, however, that are given
to man remain silent within him by day in order that he may unfold his
individual consciousness, in order that he may not be disturbed by
whatever plays into his experience from the Cosmos. During the night the
case is reversed. There man has a cosmic experience. True, it is a copy
only, but it is a faithful copy, as I have indicated. By night man has
in reality a cosmic experience and because he must pass through this
cosmic experience, therefore is his day-consciousness darkened and
paralysed.

The
future evolution of mankind will consist in this, that man will more and
more live his way into the Cosmos, and that the time will come when he
will feel himself with his consciousness in Sun and Moon and Stars, in
the same way as now he feels himself with his consciousness upon Earth.
Then he will look from the Cosmos upon the Earth, just as now he gazes
from the Earth into the Cosmos in his present waking condition. The
looking, however, will be essentially different in kind.

If we
want to take our stand for evolution in all sincerity and in a wide and
comprehensive sense, we must recognise that human consciousness too is
subject to evolution, that the body-consciousness man has today is a
transition stage that leads over to another consciousness, which will
also be a reflection in the soul of facts. Man already now experiences
the facts every night. He has need of them; for through them alone in
their after-effects can his life be maintained by day. Man's further
evolution will consist in this, that he will be conscious in normal life
of that which today constitutes for him the unconscious. For this,
however, it is essential that he should find his way into Spiritual
Science; for just as we need to bend our course in some direction or
other when we are swimming, so do we need to give a direction to
present-day ordinary consciousness. We cannot merely let ourselves be
carried along, as is the case in the customary methods of obtaining
knowledge. We need a clear direction. This guidance anthroposophical
Spiritual Science alone is able to give, because it unveils, in so far
as is necessary for present times, that which is living in man and of
which he is not yet conscious. He must receive it into his
consciousness, otherwise he can make no cosmic progress.

I have
here portrayed for you one section of all that is commonly gathered up
from the rubbish heap of modern knowledge and labelled the
‘unconscious.’ Having thus described man's unconscious
experiences during sleep, I will try in the next lecture to describe for
you the experiences that lie beyond birth and death.